This article appears in the Summer 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . Thirty seconds into the president’s remarks at a South Lawn White House event last December celebrating congressional passage of the Republican Tax Act—with virtually the entire Republican caucus standing behind him—Donald Trump held up a piece of paper. “This just came out—two minutes ago—they handed it to me.” He reported AT&T was making a capital investment of a billion dollars and giving 200,000 employees each a $1,000 bonus. Paul Ryan smiled over Trump’s left shoulder, Mike Pence over his right. “And that’s because of what we did. So that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.” It was more than pretty good. As public relations, it was brilliant. Corporate America had begun rolling out a propaganda campaign aimed at transforming the image of the least-popular tax cut in history. Soon other corporations had...

Like most of Donald Trump’s policy agenda (and the rest of his career and life), the GOP tax cut has been sold on bluster, exaggeration, and outright lies. Here are ten of the biggest myths associated with the 2017 Republican Tax Act.

This article appears in the Summer 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . 1. It Will Pay for Itself. Even though the Trump tax cuts were originally estimated to lose $1.5 trillion in revenue, supporters claimed the shortfall would be made up through greater economic activity generating more tax revenue at lower rates. No reputable economist agreed. Now, the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is that the Tax Act will in fact add $1.9 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next ten years. We also now know how Trump really intends to pay for his tax cuts: with $1.7 trillion in spending cuts to vital public services, including Medicare, which he promised he’d never touch. Other funding cuts in Trump’s proposed budget include more than $750 billion over ten years from Medicaid (also supposedly sacrosanct under Trump) and subsidized private health insurance; $200 billion–plus from nutrition assistance; and more than $70...